Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love

From New York Times best-selling author Naomi Wolf, Outrages explores the history of state-sponsored censorship and violations of personal freedoms through the inspiring, forgotten history of one writer’’s refusal to stay silenced.In 1857, Britain codified a new civil divorce law and passed a severe new obscenity law.

An 1861 Act of Parliament streamlined the harsh criminalization of sodomy.These and other laws enshrined modern notions of state censorship and validated state intrusion into people’’s private lives.In 1861, John Addington Symonds, a 21-year-old student at Oxford who already knew he loved and was attracted to men, hastily wrote out a seeming renunciation of the long love poem he’’d written to another young man.Outrages chronicles the struggle and eventual triumph of Symonds - who would become a poet, biographer, and critic -, at a time in British history when even private letters that could be interpreted as homoerotic could be used as evidence in trials leading to harsh sentences under British law.